There was a post a couple of days ago about Glacial Hammer, and I feel confident enough about my version to share as well. I'm a D3 refugee that just started playing PoE this league. I love theorycrafting for games so it's kind of the perfect setting for me.
PoB: https://pastebin.com/w9cQLuu7
Spoiler: I die a lot in these videos because I'm bad. All the deaths were avoidable if I just did the mechanics properly or paid attention.
Maven: Full fight, video has chapters per phase.
Sirus: Timestamped to last phase, video includes full fight.
This build started because my brother liked Glacial Hammer while we were leveling and learning, and eventually we got around to trying to recreate a character of his from Divinity: Original Sin 2. With that, we got two restrictions:
- Build must dual-wield
- Must use Glacial Hammer
I couldn't really find a lot of resources about dual-wielding other than "don't do it, shield is better" so I had to improvise on a lot of stuff.
Initially I tried Gladiator for the bonuses to one-handed weapon damage and attack speed. Someone mentioned I should look into Champion for the perma-fort, and that just felt so much smoother. Never have to worry about ramp up. Can't get caught without your fortification buff. Just overall tankier with comparable damage.
Things I learned while building:
- Cold conversion is neat and all, but trying to double dip with physical and cold bonuses isn't great. It's better to pick one and boost the hell out of that instead of doing both.
- Gem swaps are fine sometimes. Trying to clear without melee splash was abysmal.
- Get defensive nodes earlier in the leveling process. There's not really much point in getting offensive nodes in the early acts because everything dies anyway.
- Frostbreath is hilariously strong for Glacial Hammer. It takes an absurdly specialized rare mace/sceptre to compete in this setup.